One of the more pathetic aspects of Mitt Romney’s effort to deny Barack Obama a second term in the White House a few years ago was the extent to which he or his surrogates portrayed the president as the dreaded “Other,” a “foreign” interloper who’s not really American. “I don’t think he understands America,” Romney said of Obama at one point. “I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” said Romney campaign chairman John Sununu. Obama’s political philosophy “does not comport with the American experience,” Romney said in a...

From time to time, I surf through the right-wing blogosphere just to see what’s on the minds of people of that ilk — especially the generally overwrought folks who post comments on their favorite websites. Yesterday was the latest such occasion, and the timing could hardly have been more propitious. It was soon after the tragedy in Chattanooga, Tenn., where four U.S. Marines were shot and killed by a young man who turns out to have been a Muslim. The wingnuts were in especially high dudgeon. I expected, of course, that lots of the...

In Rudy Giuliani’s infamous disparagement of Barack Obama’s patriotism last week, he said the president only infrequently and almost begrudgingly praises America in his public remarks. That’s utter nonsense, of course, but it appeals to Obamaphobes because of their political myopia. Those folks simply can’t see or hear anything that runs counter to the notions they garner from the right-wing noise machine. To them, Obama is a foreign-born Muslim who hates America and is bent on bringing our country to ruin. In reality,...

On several occasions recently, I’ve seen a graphic on Facebook that reads as follows: “WE THE PEOPLE DEMAND BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE NOW.” We the people? How presumptuous! In reality, Obama is held in far higher regard by “we the people” than is the Republican Party. The latest figures from a website that has tracked 794 polls conducted by 67 pollsters shows that 45.3 percent of respondents currently view Obama favorably (HERE), while only 30.1 percent view the Republican Party favorably...

The answer to the question in the headline is the kind of person represented by the guy in the photo above. Of the many varieties of Obamaphobes running loose these days, the most fascinating, as I see it, are the semi-literate specimens whose hatred of the president is all-consuming. It’s become a hobby of mine to check out the Facebook pages of some of these people whose unhinged comments come to my attention during my daily perusal of the Internet. Here are a few examples (with original misspellings, mispunctuations and...